DOSBox doesn't work properly

[payturr]

Okay this time I would actually LIKE some general help because everytime I come to the forum I end up with NO HELP WHATSOEVER and I have to figure everything out, and the one time I can't which is today, I would like some assistance for once.
So I just installed DOSBox today in hopes of playing some old MS-DOS games. My problems are that it doesn't start in the console (I'm talking about tty1) and it also has issues in X where the window is bigger than the screen. I'm using an old CRT and I cannot just fix the window using --geometry=numberxnumber.
I would greatly appreciate it for once some help. If you can help me get it just running in the console, that would be more than enough for me, thank you.

[abishur]

That is an odd... and largely inaccurate, judging from your post history, way to start a post asking for assistance. Still I'm a sucker for helping out

Let's start with which distro you're using and how you installed it

[mahjongg]

Maybe i'm missing something, but how does "DOSBOX" work? Does it actually translate x86 code into ARM code? I was under the impression that it only would "impersonate" the old "X86 based PC" surroundings needed to boot the old X86 DOS, but that it would not actually also "emulate" the necessary X86 (intel 8086) CPU.
As per wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBOX

[payturr]

Certain posts have received answers but not exactly the posts I'm talking about (Never received help regarding despotify, keymapping, etc)
I'm using Raspbian, installed it using the dd tool in Linux, went through all basic set up things and I also use overscan to try and make this CRT comfortable.
And as to how DOSBox works, you're asking the wrong guy, I just simply wanna use it - if it's in the repos and people use it, and I have use for it, I wanna use it, you know what I mean? I'm not exactly the developer for this

[redhawk]

It emulates an Intel processor and rather slowly at that too.
I've tried a few DOS apps like FastTracker 2 which took about 10 minutes to load lol.
DosBox works but it's too slow and frankly unusable unless you're running basic stuff like Turbo Pascal 5.5 or Microsoft MS-DOS debugger.

Richard S.

[mahjongg]

And as to how DOSBox works, you're asking the wrong guy, I just simply wanna use it - if it's in the repos and people use it, and I have use for it, I wanna use it,

If you do not know who it works I can understand why you think its should work, its only in the repo's for x86 based computers!, specifically NOT for ARM based computers. I would think Its too much to ask the poor dosbox software to also emulate an X86 CPU! But If it does so (also emulate an x86 CPU, which it wasn't initially designed to do) it naturally would do it very slowly as for any x86 instruction it has to use many ARM instructions to fake the X86 instructions. For a rough estimate how slow it would be, divide the CPU clock by ten! So any 700MHz CPU emulating any X86 CPU, it would behave as a 70 MHz x86 CPU, can you imagine how slow that would be?

[payturr]

I've seen other people use this though on Debian Squeeze on the Raspbian Pi in the console, and even go as far to play games! It opens in X but the issue is I want to be able to run it in the console & I want it to fit my screen size, it works fine in X

[mahjongg]

I'm not sure but perhaps dosbox simply requires a GUI (or at least x-windows) to run.
remember that the PI doesn't have text mode display hardware, certainly no PC compatible (VGA) compatible hardware, so that too has to be emulated in software. (as I recall the TTY console was largely based on VGA hardware) but I'm not sure that is relevant. I'm sure that for most tasks dosbox has to emulate CGA or EGA hardware, for it to do that it needs to operate a in an x-windows like system.

[abishur]

Dosbox does appear to emulate the x86 cpu, I've quite successfully run old MS-Dos games on it. As redhawk says though, it's designed for older games. Newer ones might work with Scumm?

(Also you might want to recheck your despotify thread )

The pi is very much a community driven project so it often takes a long time for people to respond (especially when you post 20 minutes later to not worry about providing an answer ).

Raspbian is debian squeeze so you should be just fine... (I've had problems with the keymapping from console, but that was resolved fairly easily...)

Oh! When you run dosbox, do you just do ./dosbox or do you do sudo ./dosbox? I seem to remember having issues running video things from console without sudo.

[payturr]

Well there's videos on YouTube of people running it without X, so you'd think you could run it without X, and also running it in X on a CRT is simply impossible, namely because the window is just too big for the screen. I run sudo dosbox, it starts but the screen is BLACK in the console, no splash screen no nothing, I've tried waiting but nothing appears.

[lostintime]

And as to how DOSBox works, you're asking the wrong guy, I just simply wanna use it - if it's in the repos and people use it, and I have use for it, I wanna use it,

If you do not know who it works I can understand why you think its should work, its only in the repo's for x86 based computers!, specifically NOT for ARM based computers.

Nope. Look here: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/dosbox

[mahjongg]

Ah, but then its a specially modified version of dosbox, to also take on the taks of emulating the CPU, on non x86 based hardware which the original dosbox wasn't designed for!
At least Wikipedia doesn't mention emulating the CPU other than for the differences between real and extended mode (on x86 compatible hardware), so that DOS software could still be run on an (X96 based) Windows system.

[payturr]

All I know is, I've seen people use it before on their Pi and in the console, and I would just like to be able to do that as well.

[lostintime]

Ah, but then its a specially modified version of dosbox, to also take on the taks of emulating the CPU, on non x86 based hardware which the original dosbox wasn't designed for!

Are you sure you're not thinking of DOSEMU? http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/dosemu

[ukscone]

Ah, but then its a specially modified version of dosbox, to also take on the taks of emulating the CPU, on non x86 based hardware which the original dosbox wasn't designed for!
At least Wikipedia doesn't mention emulating the CPU other than for the differences between real and extended mode (on x86 compatible hardware), so that DOS software could still be run on an (X96 based) Windows system.

dosbox actually IS a cpu emulator as part of it's core functionality.

for the dosbox home page

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DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games...

however if it's compiled (and run) on an x86 device then it uses assembler for the emulation rather than C (i also think they do some semi-fancy stuff a la qemu when the host and target are the same)

[payturr]

._. I just wanted some help on getting DOSBox to work correctly on my Pi in the console using my resolution, and somehow this turned into a debate of what exactly DOSBox is.

[abishur]

did you try sudo before it?

[payturr]

Posted about that before - using dosbox doesn't work, when using sudo dosbox, screen goes black, Pi stops responding

[lostintime]

Posted about that before - using dosbox doesn't work, when using sudo dosbox, screen goes black, Pi stops responding

Does your Pi stop responding if you run GPM? Install it first with apt-get install gpm

[payturr]

I want to try it out but for some reason, ethernet isn't working..

[abishur]

Posted about that before - using dosbox doesn't work, when using sudo dosbox, screen goes black, Pi stops responding

doh! I missed that amongst the dosbox talk

[payturr]

Okay, I hit a HUGE problem. I have no internet connection on the Pi now whatsoever. I use Ethernet to connect to the internet, the Pi doesn't have an IP address, ping brings up errors, meanwhile the router sees the connection as being used, and the internet lights on the Pi are on. Does anyone know whats going on??

[abishur]

Okay, first about Dosbox. I removed and installed it on my Debian Squeeze ("Raspbian") install. Edited the config file to set "usescancodes" to false and ran the program with sudo dosbox. I got the follow lines of output:

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DOSBox version 0.74
Copyright 2002-2010 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL
___
Config: Loading primary settings from config file /root/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
ALSA: Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
MIDI: Opened device:none

then the screen went dark for a moment then it opened up the familiar dos prompt so dosbox *does* work on the Raspbian distro

Do you have any special settings in the config.txt in the boot partition?

On the internet. Is this within LXDE or in the console? Are you using DHCP or did you manually set a static IP? Either way are you comfortable with posting the contents of /etc/network/interfaces? Have you had internet in the past or is this a new development?

[payturr]

Well once I could get my internet running right again, I'll try that. I'm on Raspbian, LXDE, the official image, and I always had internet - the Pi has always been connected to my router via ethernet, and it just suddenly stopped working. I'm pretty sure it was always DHCP because the IP address was the same one everytime.

[abishur]

I ask about LXDE because there have been some issues in the past where networking would work just fine from console and then fail when you entered lxde. I think that's all been resolved, but it's something I still keep an eye out for.